About Mostly Harmful

Mostly Harmful is actually an old comic. It dates back in 2003, when I was
planning to abandon vector characters in my The ICCL comic.
I realized I couldn't just start drawing the new hand drawn characters and
expect them to be superior to the long tweaked vector characers I had, so I
came up with another comic, mostly made of the reject parts of the ICCL.
This comic was the original "Mostly Harmful". About 5 strips were ever
scripted and 2 were drawn.

Soon after drawing the first "Mostly Harmful" strips, several readers
contacted me objecting the idea. Many said that the stiff looking vector
characters made the ICCL what it is. At first I was rather frustrated about
being asked to abandon the idea I had so eagerly been working on, but looking
at the situation more objectively I realized the readers were correct. The
vector characters are the thing what makes ICCL's graphical look rather unique.
So, Mostly Harmful was buried before it had even began.

Fast forward 4 and half years. I got myself probably the most uninspiring job
in the galaxy. I'm washing and delivering cleaning towels and mops to the
cleaners of a rather large cleaning corporation. Most of my days consisted of
putting the laundry in a gigantic washing machine, then waiting an hour,
stuffing the now clean laundry into a dryer and putting another set of laundry
into the washing machine. 5 minutes of work, 55 minutes of sitting and
drinking coffee. Yay!

The ICCL had been going on all these years. There were hiatuses, hardware
failures and other major events in my life, but the ICCL had survived. The
one thing that REALLY annoyed me in my job was that I had to be there
at the office. If I had my graphics workstation there, I could have made
about 2 to 3 strips of the ICCL a day with all that spare time to kill around
there. So at first I read every god damn book I found in the office. Then all
the magazines. The corporal propaganda leaflets. All the fine print in everything
I could find. Then I realized I'd lose it if I didn't find something to channel
all this frustration into.

I picked up a piece of paper and a pen. Wow, suddenly I realized I had lots
of one strip ideas that just didn't fit anywhere in the ICCL. I started to draw
them on every piece of paper I could find. The strips varied from completely
hand drawn to modified or re-captioned newspaper articles and ads.
People found them, some actually kept the strips, some laughed and commented
I should become a cartoonist. I didn't bother telling them I already was.

Eventually the job went sour, and walking out the office for the last time
I picked up every piece of my drawings I could find. At home I realized this
was pretty much the same kind of material that the 2003 Mostly Harmful had
been. The only difference was, that the original Mostly Harmful had the ICCL
characters, and the new drawings were just pretty much whatever I had had in
mind when I drew them. But then again, this wasn't about the ICCL any more.

It was the November 2007 when I made the decision to resurrect Mostly
Harmful. I'd re-draw the original two strips and incorporate the existing
scripts to the new ideas. And for those who are curious about the original
strips, the re-made versions are "Pro-masturbation" and "No pants".

This web released version however differs from the paper version in that
I left out all the modified newspaper ads and such. Instead, I use photographs
and 3D renderings in the same spirit. From the strip #15 on, I began to
redraw also the ones that had been originally drawn on copier paper. The
characters now look like the ones in the very last strips I did at work, and
I like this style better.

Oh, and this comic IS NOT autobiographical.

Mostly Harmful VS The ICCL

Mostly Harmful's relation to the ICCL seems to be the biggest misunderstanding
of the ICCL fans. First: The ICCL isn't going to be replaced by Mostly Harmful.
The ICCL was designed as a finite comic. It means it has one big 45 chapter story
line and when the last chapter is reached, the comic ends.

The second misunderstanding is that Mostly Harmful takes the time away to
draw new ICCL strips. It does not. I draw Mostly Harmful strips in my sketch book
when I'm away from home. The coloring and background rendering time is pretty
marginal when compared to the actual drawing time. Mostly Harmful however has
some unique 3D background scenes, but most of them do appear also in the ICCL,
so the comics actually benefit eachother.

Who's doing this?

Hey, I'm A. Sovijärvi, the one to blame for this comic. I'm an Unix
system administrator by profession, but most of my interests and hobbies
include non-nerdy stuff like writing prose, restoring (and playing!) old
mechanical coin ops and traveling around, looking for food for thought.

I've been interested in comics for a long time, but lacking the graphical
skills I really got into drawing as late as in 2002 with my first serious large
project, The ICCL. Not counting random projects, there is only one other
attempt at 'real' comics, The Car Bomb, released in the class magazine
in elementary school days. The Car Bomb ran for about 200 strips.

I'm a huge fan of irony/sarcasm/black humor, which reflects on most of
my scripted work. I don't believe in black and white heroes and most of
righteous stories make me feel sick. I always tend to say, that my world isn't
black and white, it's more like 256 shades of grey.